Kindle Book Cover Design

Kindle Book Cover Design

Requirements for the size of your cover art must have an ideal height/width ratio of at least 1.6, meaning:

• A minimum of 625 pixels on the shortest side and 1000 pixels on the longest side • For best quality, your image should be 2500 pixels on the longest side

Important: We cannot accept any image larger than 10,000 pixels on the longest side.

Size

Your cover image must be less than 50MB. If the file type you are using supports compression, make sure to enable as little compression as possible, e.g. none for TIFF. Be sure to save your file with 72 dots per inch (dpi).

Color

Product images display on the Amazon website using the RGB (red, green, blue) color mode or profile. RGB is the color mode native to the web and many color screen displays, as these three colors displayed at varying levels of intensity create over 16 million colors. When saving and uploading your cover image file, save your file ONLY as RGB – not CMYK or sRGB- for the color profile. You can usually find this option in the File saving dialog of image manipulation programs such as Photoshop.

Some programs may also refer to RGB color as ‘True Color’ in some programs. If in doubt, try opening a JPG inside Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. If a JPG opens fine inside a web browser, it’s most likely OK to use as a cover image.

Make sure to save your image without color separation. This is usually a pre-press or color palette option. Use your image manipulation program or image analysis tool (some are freely available online) to verify that your image file doesn’t have color separation.

Use color images whenever possible and relevant. In addition to the Kindle black and white e-ink reading devices, customers can read your books on full color Fire devices and free-to-download Kindle reading apps for iPhone, iPad, Android, PC or Mac.

Borders for White Cover Art

Cover art with white or very light backgrounds can seem to disappear against the white background. Adding a very narrow (3-4 pixel) border in medium gray will define the boundaries of the cover.

Uploading Your Cover

To upload your cover:

1. Log in to your account at http://kdp.amazon.com/ and navigate to your Bookshelf.2. From the bookshelf, you can either upload your cover, but selecting “Edit book details” from the “Other Book Actions” column or simply click “Add Cover” for your book in the “Title” column to go directly to the cover uploader.3. Click on “Browse for image” under the “Upload or Create a Book Cover” section.4. When you see a the pop-up window appear, Click “Browse” to find your cover image file on your computer and click “Open.”5. If your image meets our specifications, you will see a message of “Processing” will appear.6. Once your image completes the conversion process, the message “Cover uploaded successfully” will appear along with the thumbnail for your cover image.7. Scroll to the bottom of page and click “Save and Continue.”

You’ll then be redirected to “Rights & Pricing” where you’ll need to reconfirm Content Rights, and click “Save and Publish” at the bottom of the screen. Changes will take effect on the website within 24 hours, though cover image files may take up to 72 hours. The image you see in preview serves ONLY as a placeholder while your book completes the publishing process. The publishing process takes approximately 24 hours to complete and populating to the Kindle Store. Cover image files may take up to 72 hours. We appreciate your patience during this time so that we may ensure we are providing a high quality eBook experience for our Kindle customers.